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Off the Shelf: ‘Exposure,’ the Story of a British Whistle-Blower in Japan

Barely a year later, Mr. Woodford, a Briton who spent his career rising through Olympus’s ranks, has produced a memoir of the scandal, “Exposure — Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went From C.E.O. to Whistle-Blower” (Portfolio, $27.95).

One could be forgiven for meager expectations. This book was written quickly, and by a chief executive with no professional writing experience and no co-author. Yet “Exposure” is a cut above many C.E.O. memoirs, and is at least equal to most business-scandal books you are likely to find. It is also a harsh indictment of the clubby and unquestioning ways that still flourish in some quarters of the Japanese corporate world.

At its best, especially in the first half of the book, Mr. Woodford’s story is as suspenseful as a minor John Grisham novel. It begins last year, barely four months after his elevation to president when, after a long day of meetings at Olympus’s European headquarters in Hamburg, he opens an e-mail sent by one of his aides in Tokyo. It contains an article from a Japanese business magazine called Facta, contending that Olympus had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on questionable and money-losing acquisitions.

When Mr. Woodford rushes back to Tokyo, he expects to find the company in an uproar. What he finds instead is business as usual. He asks two executives if they have seen the article. Yes, they acknowledge, they have. Then why, he asks, hadn’t they told him about it sooner? Because Olympus’s chairman, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, told them not to, they answer. When Mr. Woodford confronts the imperious Mr. Kikukawa about the matter, Mr. Kikukawa brushes off the whole matter as insignificant and unworthy of his attention.

Though the two men had been close, Mr. Woodford paints a devastating portrait of Mr. Kikukawa as vainglorious and ignorant of product details.

“While it was often patently obvious he didn’t understand what he was talking about, my colleagues never dared expose this,” he writes. “I quickly learned that no one ever asked why the emperor wasn’t wearing clothes.” When the two men were photographed together for a corporate portrait, Mr. Kikukawa stood on a box to minimize the obvious height differential.

It turns out that no one at Olympus wants to explain to Mr. Woodford the first thing about the acquisitions in question, much less dig into the Facta allegations. Alarmed, Mr. Woodford brings in Ernst & Young to investigate.

At a subsequent board meeting, one Japanese director criticizes him about bringing “outsiders” in. Mr. Woodford writes: “His message was clear to me: Olympus was a family, and families require loyalty.”

The author adds: “It reminded me of the speech Michael Corleone delivered to his hapless brother Fredo when he disagreed with him in front of the Las Vegas crowd in ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Three days later, a nattily dressed Mr. Kikukawa calls another board meeting, at which point Mr. Woodford is fired. “I stared at Kikukawa: at the cut of his expensive suit, at the precision of the knot in that silk tie, at the curt, pinched smile that played beneath his nose,” the author writes. “He struck me as a ludicrous figure, and so delusional. He resembled little more than the captain of a sinking ship who believed that by throwing out the dead weight, his vessel would suddenly right itself and resume its calm drift toward the horizon.”

Mr. Woodford is escorted from the building, at which point he decides to go public, igniting a storm of controversy. He holds news conferences and appears on news programs in New York, London and Tokyo, coming away with a new appreciation for the Fourth Estate. The Olympus board tries to fight back, and here one sees vividly the ways that some sectors of corporate Japan are still firmly mired in the last century — well, make that the 19th century. In such circles, executives may have little sense of how transparency has transformed international business.

The books loses much of its energy about two-thirds of the way through, when the $1.7 billion cover-up is finally and fully explained; after that, the writing is on the wall. It turns out that after a currency devaluation in the 1980s, Olympus, like any number of Japanese corporations, found ways to hide the resulting losses. Looking to right itself, Olympus engaged in risky derivative trades that its senior executives barely understood, leading to still larger losses.

Eventually, a complex scheme was devised to inflate the purchase price of three nonsensical acquisitions; the extra money was then channeled back to Olympus — in one case, via a titanic $687 million “advisory fee” — erasing the hidden losses.

This fall, Mr. Kikukawa and two other former executives pleaded guilty over charges related to the accounting cover-up.

MR. WOODFORD has emerged as a hero, named by at least one British newspaper as its 2011 executive of the year. And rightly so. His gift for candor, so evident as a whistle-blower, serves him well as a memoirist. He acknowledges that at the depths of the scandal, he took to self-medicating with alcohol; he wakes up with a bad hangover more than once in this book’s pages.

About the worst one can say about “Exposure” is that Mr. Woodford can come off as preachy and a tad self-righteous at times. But after all that Olympus and its board put him through, it’s probably fair to say he deserves a bit of time on his soapbox.

After Curfew: Campus Life Gains More Exposure on the Web

Since then, Jeffrie Ray, 19, who is on leave from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and his partner, Arya Toufanian, a 20-year-old junior at George Washington University, have produced 23 more “I’m Shmacked” YouTube college party videos from campuses as varied as Tulane, Syracuse and N.Y.U. to Penn State and Ithaca College.

Their popularity is evident from the stats on their “I’m Shmacked” Facebook page — over 46,000 likes — and on YouTube — more than 500,000 views alone on the West Virginia University video (which highlights among other antics, students smashing car windows, in between beer bongs, as part of a St. Patrick’s Day charity party).

A lot is packed into these three- to four-minute clips set to a wide variety of music. And it is not just girls making out (there is a lot of that), guys pouring booze over one another’s heads (and balconies), and students doing flattering albeit somewhat profane shout-outs for their college or university. Woven into the scenes of debauchery are bucolic shots of the campus with flags waving in the breeze, the football stadiums or hockey arenas filled with athletes and cheerleaders, and the local university swag shops.

“I think we are doing something positive for the schools: I have had about 30 kids say they ended up at a school because of my video,” said Mr. Ray, who is known as Yofray and who plans to finish filming “parties” at the end of this school year (he is recording video of a different campus each week), when he will move onto other campus scenes. “I want to gather videos of the sports and academic life to make them into a longer film. The students at these schools also work hard, and I want to show that, too,” he said, adding that he plans to interview professors and students about their institution’s more serious sides.

“Kids don’t want to read anymore,” said Mr. Toufanian, referring to college brochures. “Seeing a video is a much more fun way to learn about a school.” Mr. Toufanian, the business side of the duo (Mr. Ray is the videographer), has secured a two-year contract with DGI Management in New York that he hopes will help the “I’m Shmacked” brand move into other platforms, with books being one.

But not everyone sees these college videos as slightly wacky promotional tools. Just ask students and administrators at the University of Michigan, which early this month was “Shmacked” (a contrived word from Mr. Ray’s high school in Pennsylvania) for the second time (the first being last November), during “Welcome Week.”

“I was horrified when I saw it,” said Melanie Kruvelis, a junior who wrote an opinion article in The Michigan Daily student newspaper that went on to say the word “shmacked” must be “Yiddish for getting drunk and throwing away the futures we don’t have.”

To Ms. Kruvelis, who has seen students desperately take down Facebook images before their first job interview, getting caught on a video “for 30 seconds you might not even remember after shotgunning a beer” seems stupid. “It’s not my parents’ age when you could hide the party photos in a drawer,” she added. “To do this on a video that can go viral, you must have a train-wreck mentality.”

Mary Jo Desprez, the administrator at the collegiate recovery program at Michigan, which helps students who have alcohol and substance issues stay sober, agrees. “These kinds of images of partying in college limit students’ imagination of what fun can be without drugs and drinking,” she said. “It glorifies alcohol, especially as they are not just sitting casually around a keg but pouring bottles of vodka down their throat. We need to have a more complicated conversation about this on campuses, even though this is only about 1,000 of our 27,000 students partying like this, because it can resonate.”

But as one student claimed in a comment about a video, “You can’t be considered an alcoholic until after you graduate.” And then there is the ubiquitous phrase “I’m Shmacked,” shouted by students on almost every video, usually with a glass or bottle feebly in hand. As Ms. Kruvelis wrote in her newspaper piece, they are hardly referring to enjoying some “bagel toppings.”

After Curfew: Campus Life Gains More Exposure on the Web

Since then, Jeffrie Ray, 19, who is on leave from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and his partner, Arya Toufanian, a 20-year-old junior at George Washington University, have produced 23 more “I’m Shmacked” YouTube college party videos from campuses as varied as Tulane, Syracuse and N.Y.U. to Penn State and Ithaca College.

Their popularity is evident from the stats on their “I’m Shmacked” Facebook page — over 46,000 likes — and on YouTube — more than 500,000 views alone on the West Virginia University video (which highlights among other antics, students smashing car windows, in between beer bongs, as part of a St. Patrick’s Day charity party).

A lot is packed into these three- to four-minute clips set to a wide variety of music. And it is not just girls making out (there is a lot of that), guys pouring booze over one another’s heads (and balconies), and students doing flattering albeit somewhat profane shout-outs for their college or university. Woven into the scenes of debauchery are bucolic shots of the campus with flags waving in the breeze, the football stadiums or hockey arenas filled with athletes and cheerleaders, and the local university swag shops.

“I think we are doing something positive for the schools: I have had about 30 kids say they ended up at a school because of my video,” said Mr. Ray, who is known as Yofray and who plans to finish filming “parties” at the end of this school year (he is recording video of a different campus each week), when he will move onto other campus scenes. “I want to gather videos of the sports and academic life to make them into a longer film. The students at these schools also work hard, and I want to show that, too,” he said, adding that he plans to interview professors and students about their institution’s more serious sides.

“Kids don’t want to read anymore,” said Mr. Toufanian, referring to college brochures. “Seeing a video is a much more fun way to learn about a school.” Mr. Toufanian, the business side of the duo (Mr. Ray is the videographer), has secured a two-year contract with DGI Management in New York that he hopes will help the “I’m Shmacked” brand move into other platforms, with books being one.

But not everyone sees these college videos as slightly wacky promotional tools. Just ask students and administrators at the University of Michigan, which early this month was “Shmacked” (a contrived word from Mr. Ray’s high school in Pennsylvania) for the second time (the first being last November), during “Welcome Week.”

“I was horrified when I saw it,” said Melanie Kruvelis, a junior who wrote an opinion article in The Michigan Daily student newspaper that went on to say the word “shmacked” must be “Yiddish for getting drunk and throwing away the futures we don’t have.”

To Ms. Kruvelis, who has seen students desperately take down Facebook images before their first job interview, getting caught on a video “for 30 seconds you might not even remember after shotgunning a beer” seems stupid. “It’s not my parents’ age when you could hide the party photos in a drawer,” she added. “To do this on a video that can go viral, you must have a train-wreck mentality.”

Mary Jo Desprez, the administrator at the collegiate recovery program at Michigan, which helps students who have alcohol and substance issues stay sober, agrees. “These kinds of images of partying in college limit students’ imagination of what fun can be without drugs and drinking,” she said. “It glorifies alcohol, especially as they are not just sitting casually around a keg but pouring bottles of vodka down their throat. We need to have a more complicated conversation about this on campuses, even though this is only about 1,000 of our 27,000 students partying like this, because it can resonate.”

But as one student claimed in a comment about a video, “You can’t be considered an alcoholic until after you graduate.” And then there is the ubiquitous phrase “I’m Shmacked,” shouted by students on almost every video, usually with a glass or bottle feebly in hand. As Ms. Kruvelis wrote in her newspaper piece, they are hardly referring to enjoying some “bagel toppings.”